


chase the clouds from the ground

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 18:05:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick's story is short, for containing so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chase the clouds from the ground

Dick Grayson’s costume had been blue to match his eyes, his wide and silent eyes, when he had stood on spindly legs atop the platform and watched his parents fall like stones away from him. He had never thought it would be possible for someone’s breath to be trapped in their stomach, but his was held there and it festered all through the funeral, all through Jack Haley’s warm hands on his shoulders as the rain plummeted from the sky.

Bruce Wayne has taught him a lot of things since then. He’s taught Dick how to let the shadows move around him like fingers, and he’s taught him how to take down men three times his size and he’s taught him how to hear the night, and he’s taught him not to be scared and he’s taught him to think and not feel.

Dick has always felt. It is a quality that controls his every limb, no matter how much he feigns the indifference that he _knows_ Batman prefers. Making decisions is not an action that can be accompanied by bias, and growing the hell up isn’t, either. Dick can win nearly any fight, and he’s smart and calculating and _professional_ , barring his abuse of the English language and his tendency to laugh at things whenever he can, because each laugh lets out a little bit more of that breath in his stomach.

He knows that he wants to help people. It’s not so much that he wants to promote the good; it’s that he wants to take out the bad, cut it away like a tumor and watch it dissolve. The good have always needed more room, he thinks. They can hardly even breathe anymore.

His mother had called him her little robin, fleet and red-breasted and proud, so that is the name he chooses to carry with him, its small and fraying legacy stitched to his back like wings (the wings he should have had back then).


End file.
